Ospedale degli Innocenti
The Hospital of the Innocents was a home for abandoned children. Brunelleschi’s loggia with nine round arches on slender columns is usually counted as the first Renaissance building. Everything derives from the same measure, so the arcade is calm and clear.
The hospital was commissioned by the silk merchants’ guild in Florence, the Arte della Seta, as a charitable institution for foundlings. Brunelleschi was given the commission and work began in 1419. The hospital opened in 1445 and took in its first child. Parents who could not care for their child could leave it at an opening by the door, and the children were then brought up and taught a trade. Brunelleschi left before the building was finished, and his successors changed some details, which he is said to have criticised.
The loggia along the square has nine round arches resting on slender Corinthian columns. Each bay is covered by a small dome, and the width of the bay equals the height of the columns, so that each bay forms a cube. Brunelleschi had the details in grey sandstone, pietra serena, mark the structure against the whitewashed walls. This means the building’s system of measures can be read directly. Around 1487 Andrea della Robbia made the roundels of blue and white glazed terracotta with swaddled infants between the arches.
The loggia became the model for the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, where a similar loggia was built opposite in the 16th century, making the square one of the first planned Renaissance squares. The hospital took in children until 1875 and still works for children through a foundation. Since 2016 it has housed a museum of the institution’s history. The building shows how the Renaissance combined the forms of antiquity with a new interest in regularity and measurability.